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Salt Sugar Fat Summary

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Salt Sugar Fat
How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Salt Sugar Fat is an in-depth read focused on the unhealthful industry of processed foods and how these foods affect the consumer. The author, Michael Moss, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and journalist who spent years researching and writing this book. He is a recipient of a Loeb Award in “Food Safety” and has reported for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among other papers. In this book Moss explores what goes on behind the scenes in the food industry, offering details from many first-hand accounts, in a narrative style. Salt Sugar Fat is broken into three sections, focusing on the three different elements in the title. Moss discusses these ingredients as the …show more content…

When it comes to making a profit, the industry will go to great ends to keep their customers buying, and in increasing amounts. So when it comes to sugar, fat, and salt, they “methodically study and control their use”. Food scientists engineer these foods to get the most alluring results, even if the final product isn’t healthful and contains detrimental amounts of an ingredient. With how well these high calorie foods sell, the industry does not have much of an incentive to produce healthier foods. Generally the only time companies are willing to adjust content levels are when health concerns make people spend more money on healthier alternatives, thus offsetting the rise in production costs it takes to create foods with less of the ingredients that serve as such effective fillers. Another facet to the drive of the food marketing business is competition. The food industry is a war zone made up of so many big names we are familiar with: Kellogg, Post, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, Campbell, to name a few. It is of utmost importance to these companies that they outperform and always stay a step ahead of their rivals. For example, when PepsiCo announced a program in 2010 to cut salt in their products by an average of 25% and promote less sugary drinks, Coca-Cola planned to take full advantage of what they viewed was a foolish decision by PepsiCo by pushing their own marketing even further. These “food giants” are so focused on moving forward and beating out competition they often overlook the impact their products have on the

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